


The Veil Dodger

by Vulgarweed



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Fake Major Character Death, Canon Real Major Character Death, F/F, Femslash, Ghost Possession, Grief, Morbid Comedy, Spiritualism, discussion of suicide, seances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27291490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: In the aftermath of what certainly appears to be the suicide of Sherlock Holmes, a grieving Mrs. Hudson has a lot of questions, and she will stop at nothing to get answers. Including answering a very dodgy ad for a psychic medium. The answers she receives don’t match the questions she asked.
Relationships: Mrs. Hudson/Madame Tracy
Comments: 20
Kudos: 33
Collections: Get Mrs. Hudson Laid





	1. Solitude

Martha Hudson refused to believe that Sherlock Holmes had really wanted to die.

When she’d heard the news, she fell to her knees wailing with her heart clenched cold. As though she had lost a son, which in some sense, that strange, brilliant, brittle young man had become. The nightmare days immediately after - poor John, hollowed out and ghostly, half-dead himself. Cold tea, uneaten breakfasts, those horrible tabloid papers saying the worst possible things about the man they loved, lying about in the entryway ripped to shreds.

“You didn’t hear him,” John said in a flat, dull voice. “The way he was. You didn’t see . . . “

He left it hanging. She hadn’t seen it. John had. And that was something that would change John forever.

Oh, Martha had been in some ways braced to lose him sooner or later. His work was so very dangerous. Most of criminal London wanted him dead, and he was reckless. Even the drugs sometimes, dreadful business. Some part of her understood that it was unlikely he’d live to see the ripe old age that she’d reached. He could get so intensely focused on the problems in his head, he might even walk out in front of a bus one day. She’d be heartbroken at that - but not so fundamentally shaken to the core.

But in all the ways her beloved tenant could leave this world, this was the one she did _not_ see coming. Certainly he was moody, and his dark phases could hover like a raincloud over 221B Baker Street for weeks on end. Yet when he worked, there was no one she had ever met who was more vividly, profoundly _alive_ than Sherlock. To think he could take his own life under the shadow of vicious rumours, without even an attempt to unweave and expose the lies? No, he would never. This kind of death, for Sherlock? Against all possibility and reason.

Shaking her head with pity and sorrow at the sad stack of unopened mail that lay in the hallway, she started to push it aside with her foot and then she bent low to see a strange sheet of paper caught curled halfway in the mail slot.

Amateur advertising circular. A waste of paper. But the font was clearly of the kind meant to look old and classy.

 **TRAVEL BEYOND THE VEIL WITH AN EXPERIENCED MEDIUM,** it said.  
**Speak With Spirits who Bringeth Wisdom. Communicate With Loved Ones who have Crossed Over.  
Astrology. Tea Readings. Hypnotism. Palmistry. Tarot. Clairvoyance.  
Séance Appointments Available Every Afternoon Except Thursdays.  
Call Today. Someone On the Other Side is Waiting to Hear From You.**

Mrs Hudson made a little squeak of annoyance, and almost crumpled it up. She didn’t want John to have to see it. Surely whoever put that here didn’t _know,_ did they? Vultures and charlatans, the lot of them.

But something about it stopped her. Something appealed to her, somehow. She took it into her flat and shut the door.

Later, after a solid hour of on-and-off-weeping that even her herbal soothers and her favourite Black Sabbath album ( _Master of Reality_ ) couldn’t quite squelch, she looked at it again. There was a phone number and an address.

Every afternoon except Thursdays. Today was, she thought, a Tuesday. Tomorrow would be Wednesday. My, how the days all blurred together in that terrible silence from 221B. At least those dreadful tabloid reporters had finally gone. She wondered if Mycroft had something to do with that. Oh, poor Mycroft. He had to be suffering, the poor man, and probably had no one he could show it to. The stiffest upper lips break the hardest, that much she knew.

***

  
Mrs. Hudson thought of herself as a rational person, by and large. She very pointedly told herself that she did not believe in ghosts, including the ones she was very certain she had seen. If there was a life after this one, a world beyond - which, frankly, she thought it was fairly rational to assume there must be, after all Nature wastes nothing - then it firmly kept its secrets. If those who had passed were angels watching over, or getting poked by red pitchforks down below, or if Mrs. Turner’s tiny but bossy cat had been Napoleon in a past life, well, she had closed that box tight by telling herself that the affairs of the dead were not yet any of her business.

She thought she would be ready to breach the veil by Friday.


	2. Into the Void

The apartment building didn't seem particularly mystical from the outside - it was a nondescript old building just off the fashionable side of Soho. She might have walked past it a hundred times on the way to something more interesting. There was a handwritten list of names, and she hit the buzzer that seemed to belong to the right person.

The door swung open, and as Mrs. Hudson walked carefully up the stairs she happened to see someone peering at her. A man, who might have been any age between 50 and 600, peering at her through a haze of nicotine and spite. "Is it for the demonic activity or for the hoorin'" he muttered before slamming the door in her face.

"Well, I never!" Mrs. Hudson muttered. The man's accent had been nearly as offensive as his smell. But as she turned around in the hallway, a heavy fug of frankincense indicated the right direction.

A little sheepishly, she knocked on Madame Tracy's door.

"Oh there you are love. Do come in. We've got a small gathering today, so all the better for you. I am so sorry to hear about your young man. We will make sure to make him feel welcome when we do reach him. Come, have some tea."

That made Mrs. Hudson feel a little bit less on the wrong footing.

Even more so did Madame Tracy's parlor - an absolute jumble of homey kitsch. A table was draped in a cheap pashmina with candles glowing in glass jars, and the aforementioned reek of incense darkened the room (and, Mrs. Hudson suspected, helped to fight off the noxious fumes from Madame Tracy's intransigent neighbour.) She wasn't so far gone in her grief that the smell of tobacco that terrible could set her off, no, not yet. Still it reminded her of her purpose here. She wrung her hands a little, uncertain what to do with those of Sherlock's things she'd brought with her in a little carpetbag.

She had gone for practicality rather than dramatic effect - a scarf (a backup, not the one John told her had been ruined.) A teacup that he'd drunk from in her flat. One of his favourite biscuits. A slide from his microscope. Anything more than that, she'd have to invade John's privacy more than she was willing. The skull, the violin? Too precious, too intimate. She still wasn't nearly trusting enough.

Madame Tracy was a blowsy redhead - certainly not a natural one - of perhaps slightly north of sixty, covered in makeup that she no doubt thought was dramatic. Poor dear needs to have her colours done, Martha thought. That orange is doing her no favours. Still, there was something endearing about her dedication to the atmosphere, even if it was very much over the top.

The other woman there, a Mrs. Ormerod, seemed very interested in speaking to her dead husband Ron, although it did seem to Martha that neither one of them had been the greatest conversationalist in life. She was dour, and bound and determined to take over the proceedings.

But Madame Tracy was far more interested in the newcomer. "So your loved one. . . was a bit of a celebrity, wasn't he?" she said, pouring yet more tea as though that would help to lubricate the spirits. Martha was suddenly feeling in need of some more direct spirits. A shot of something strong in that teacup would not go amiss. It was still very difficult to even think about talking about him.

"What you read in those horrible papers," she finally said. "It's not true, none of it."

"Of course not, dear."

"What they say, that he was a fraud...and he did  _ what he did _ ...because he was caught. None of that's true. It can't be true. He was a brilliant man, and he was for real. Why, he saved me so many times --" and there she could not restrain a little sob.

Madame Tracy patted her hand with jingling bracelets, and if Mrs. Hudson might normally have been inclined to recoil, she did not.

"I'm sure he has a lot to say to you, dear."

"Oh, well, either in he's in one of his silent moods or else I won't get a word in edgewise."

"Are you hoping to clear his name?"

"Of course," Martha said. "Of course I doubt the papers would take an old lady at a séance seriously. But he must have left a clue. He must. He was so clever, our Sherlock. He left a trail. Something to find that would prove himself honest after he was gone. He would have done that. He had his pride, he did, and he wouldn't let us - the ones he left behind - he wouldn't let us go on thinking the worst forever, he just wouldn't. I have to know what it is."

"He may speak in riddles, dear. He may be as much in need of comfort as you are. I perceive that he was very dear to you."

"Like a son to me," she said, sniffling. Tracy passed her a handkerchief. "Oh, he would laugh so hard to see me here."

"Passing through the veil has a way of changing the skeptics," Tracy said gently. "Now come here to the table, and we'll draw aside the veil. It is nearly time. Please be patient while my guide opens the gateway."

So the only people at the table were Mrs Ormerod and Mrs Hudson, and a colourless girl named Jenny who seemed as though she was obligated to be there. "My sister," Jenny said quietly. She bent her head down and whispered. "I don't like her. I suppose I ought to be sorry she's dead but I'm not. I just do hope she's happy over there so I don't have to feel too guilty. I don't understand why she's haunting me. It's not as if I killed her."

Mrs. Hudson could only imagine what Sherlock might say to that. Indeed, she felt his presence more closely than she had since she walked into the room.

_ She most certainly did kill her sister _ , said that droll voice in her head. She couldn't help but smile, and the ritual hadn't even started yet.

_ Watch out for wishful thinking _ , she told herself.  _ You can make yourself imagine anything if you want it badly enough, so take a note from himself and be skeptical. Observe. Do not extrapolate excessively ahead of the facts, _ or something like that. What she wouldn't give to be able to remember his exact words as he perforated balloons of mental manure with a wit like a needle.

"I'm honored, if he comes through," said Jenny. "I mean, I know who he is. Sherlock Holmes, right? You were his landlady? I always liked reading about him. I thought he was handsome too. I'm so sorry. I don't believe he was a fake, if that helps. I was really sad about it. Sadder than my sister, and I never met him. That says something."

"I suppose we'll have to meet your sister soon too, won't we dear?" Mrs Hudson said with just a hint of acid. Jenny hadn't had much of a welcome to begin with, and it was by now damn thin.

"Well, I'm looking forward to speaking with our Ron again," said Mrs. Ormerod, though no one had asked her. "I'm a regular here. He always comes when I call, which was more than I can say for him when he was alive. Passing through the veil - it changes one. You might find your young man is a little more understanding of the sufferings he put his loved ones through on earth. But don't expect any great wisdom, no. If he's like my Ron, he'll just want to know all the doings of the family, the little things that we take for granted in the world. Marriages and first words and what we had for Sunday supper. That's what they miss, the dead."

Mrs. Hudson tried to imagine Sherlock taking an interest in those things alive or dead, and decided that if she got any indication of the sort it would be proof positive that Madame Tracy was a fraud. You didn't have to be a genius detective to figure that out. She just nodded and hoped her silence would prove an instructive example.

"Now is the time," Madame Tracy intoned, rolling her eyes back in her head. "We take hands around the sacred circle." She reached out. Martha uneasily took hands with Jenny and Mrs Ormorod, who were connected on their ends to Tracy. Some strange part of her wished she was holding Tracy's hands directly. Maybe it made the connection stronger or something. One could only suppose.

Tracy was invoking her spirit guide, supposedly an Irish orphan girl. Died in the famine perhaps? Or the Troubles? or one of those dreadful laundries Martha had seen a film about? At any rate, she thought it was in dubious taste. At least, that music-hall Oirish accent certainly was. "Yes. Yes, my dear. We are ready. How are you, darling?"

"Sure an' I'm well enough, by the door. There are spirits waiting here. One only recently just arrived. He's a cheeky one."

Mrs. Hudson felt her heart leap, rather painfully.

"I think he's coming through. Cuchulainn himself couldn't stop him."

Tracy sighed and wiggled in her seat, bracelets jingling, as she began to groan and the candles flickered. She gave a little moan and dropped her head to her chest as she shook, receiving the possession. When she emerged, and lifted her head, there was something in her face that was not her. Something male and proud and young.

"S-Sherlock?" Martha asked carefully, barely daring to hope. "I'm looking for...Sherlock Holmes. Is that you, love?"

"OH, how dare you," said the voice. It was not Madame Tracy's voice. Nor the girl's, but it was still slightly Irish.

"I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes," Martha repeated. If the ghost could be stubborn, so could she.

But when she looked closely at Madame Tracy she knew that something had fundamentally changed. Her eyes now had a cold emptiness, and she was moving her head slightly, in an odd reptilian oscillating motion.

“Hel-lo there,” said the voice that came out of Madame Tracy’s mouth. It was sing-song, and mocking, and infinitely cruel. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”


End file.
